


soldiers, before you fall

by cuimhl



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: M/M, character introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-16
Updated: 2016-12-16
Packaged: 2018-09-08 23:36:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8867773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuimhl/pseuds/cuimhl
Summary: At a summer training camp, his eye catches on a solitary figure skating around the rink three hours before their practice session begins, and he stumbles. Then he picks himself up, regains his footing, and keeps walking.





	

 

**prelude: the hero of kazakhstan**

 

There’s this thing called,  _ admiration _ . Otabek is familiar with it. He sees it in the way that his coach teaches him his first triple jump, in the way that Viktor Nikiforov glides over the ice on national television, in the way that his mother teaches his fumbling, teenage hands to cook.

At a summer training camp, his eye catches on a solitary figure skating around the rink three hours before their practice session begins, and he stumbles. Then he picks himself up, regains his footing, and keeps walking.

Otabek Altin might be the taciturn foreigner, the boy with a mouthful of stammering Russian and a few handy moves under his belt, but he’s not a simple man. There are many things he wants to do; wander back five years in his life and the bone-deep ache for success has already begun to fester in his flesh, drilling the scarring lesson of self-realisation into his head. No success comes from whiling away his time, or from anything but a single-minded concentration. 

Thus, he’s hard-working and dedicated, and he cares little for the social structures of interpersonal interaction and small talk, much less his own image among the rest of his peers. If it won’t help him, he won’t entertain it. It’s become a habit tarred with fear, with inhibition, and he knocks it all down in one sip like he’s unafraid to face it. But that’s not true.

The difference between overpractice and pushing physical limits is a fine one, and he thinks he’s got the balance down to a fine art. Until he wakes up with muscles stiff as the floorboards, feet still warm with the lingering memory of leather skates around them, he won’t stop. Until recognition, the gold medal, his family’s proud gaze is within reach, he  _ can’t  _ stop.

That’s put an unbridgeable distance between him and the rest of the skaters at the training camp, and they talk less and less. It helps him concentrate better, gives him drive to complete his full warm up and warm down in the quiet, empty rink, and Otabek takes it with a vestige of gratitude. Sometimes he still finds that lonely boy leaping and turning on the ice before and after he finishes, but he forces himself to look away.

In his mind, he berates the stranger. Hopes, just a little, that he’ll fall. Hopes, just the same, that he’ll be the one standing next to him on the podium, and maybe wishes he could talk to him.

It doesn’t make sense that he cares. The ice is but a battlefield; all illusions are cumbersome, Otabek knows this only too well.

But then he catches his eye, that Russian prodigy everyone is talking about, palms cupped over their mouths as they whisper as if he can’t hear them anyway. The boy who tucks his elbows in and squares his shoulders like he’s anticipating a fight, looking back at him with the same recognition of war simmering in his gaze.

He’s a soldier, this one. 

Otabek was born to struggle through the quagmire, to roll up his trouser legs and pretend it doesn’t hurt when he practices after hours in a darkened studio, staring at his reflection in the million mirrors turning his own maturing physique into dust and insignificance in the lengthening shadows of sunset. 

  
So he recognises a kindred spirit. That doesn’t mean he has to care. Even if he does.

 

 

 

 **prelude: the fairy of** **russia**

 

Yuri Plisetsky is, by no means, a gentle boy. 

He’s fifteen and ready to fight, more than willing to fight, and knows how to fight. How to raise his fists and guard his face, to carve a perfect left uppercut against an opponent’s jaw and catch them with a long knee to the abdomen. How to throw himself into his spins, to give himself over body and soul for each jump like they’re the grand finale.

There are different ways to fight, he knows.

One way is his knife-sharp tongue, the way he lashes out cruelly like the single arch of a whip and asks, “what are you doing here?”

When he was four and just kind enough to cradle an abandoned kitten in his arms, three boys loomed over him and laughed. Their words hurt more than any kicks they dared to give him, fearing retribution from an adult. They dared him to tell, to cry and to beg and Yuri didn’t, he stared them down and held his kitten and learnt how to be  _ wicked _ . How to  _ hurt _ .

Attack is the best defense, and if Yuri is to treat stray cats with rare kindness, he must learn to defend. They think he’s a pushover, but he’ll prove them wrong; if the first lesson to fight back taught him anything, it was that the underestimated are always most powerful.

_ Power. _ Yuri’s not about to scavenge it from the pockets of corrupt officials, or bribe it from people who’ve never bowed their heads to him once. 

He might be young, small and weak, but never has a heart burned with such ferocity for that which others might shake their heads at and call ambition. Ambition is for the faint-hearted, a word to validate the impossibility of something that is only rendered so because of one’s own inability to achieve it.

Well, Yuri will do more than that. He’ll run his fingers over the gold filigree of his own crown and ask, “what are you doing here?” And he’ll show them the raging forest fire that starves for oxygen and fuel, have them hanging onto his every word; that is power, and that is protection. How do you protect something if you can’t even protect yourself?

So he’s going to fight until his last breath. He’s going to fight, he’s going to fight, he’s going to silence all the whispers around him trying to guess at what he’s going to become before he’s even become it.

It’s greater than anything they can imagine, anyway.

 

 

**the first song: kidnapping**

 

Otabek owns a motorcycle. He also owns a helmet. He is, therefore, more than prepared to ride his motorcycle on a regular basis, which has become a habitual relaxation strategy, an act that pre-empts all succeeding thought and unwinds his nerves before they can settle in his throat and curl up around his windpipe.

Apropos to nothing, he kidnaps a Russian fairy along the way.

Or so the newspaper headlines say, scream, whichever; the fact is that he has snared Yuri Plisetsky for a ride, something that has not needed much in the way of considering in order to do. Which suggests he’s been thinking about it for a long time, which is also not overtly false or especially erroneous in any aspect of the idea’s conception, but Otabek is not planning on debating about it.

All that one needs to know, is: Otabek and Yuri are on a motorcycle together, and they’re going somewhere. 

There’s a tense quality about Yuri when he’s stranded in the unknown, and Otabek looks back for a fleeting moment as they swing around a sharp turn to find those same blue eyes looking up above them, hair tossing about his face. 

In that fraction of a second, that heartbeat paused mid-fall, Yuri looks oddly open and yet closed at the same time. The brambles and overgrown wilderness has been cleared from the forefront of his great, fortified walls, and Otabek catches the details of a surprisingly simplistic defense. It’s not one broken easily, perhaps, but often the simplest things are also the most complex. 

Otabek is going to have to do a lot of thinking, just to think more simply. It turns out Yuri Plisetsky is truly not such a difficult person to figure out. And yet, the hardest part is just ahead - he’s going to put up a fight.

They share that, the two of them. A desire not to be understood the whole way through for fear of exposing vulnerabilities.

Ah, but Otabek has a feeling about this time. That maybe, Yuri Plisetsky will understand him the whole way through, and for the first time, he will let him.

****  
  


 

**the second song: a handshake**

 

In the evening of this strange day of unprecedented events, Yuri is posed a question.

It’s not a hard question; yes or no.

_ Yes or no. _

But he’s never been asked this before, and the novelty is not exciting, but rather terrifying. What does a friendship entail? He knows his relationship with Viktor, which he used to take for hero worship and then for an irritating sibling, but now the details are sunk in murky water swirling at his ankles. There’s the pork cutlet bowl, that incomprehensible pig, but Yuri is far less certain of that one than he is about Viktor.

All he’s ever known is half of the give and take equation - which side he is most familiar with, depends on perspective. Everything does. 

Otabek looks at him, a measuring gaze levelled at his without flinching. Yuri knows people who would look away, would remember his foul mouth and steely glare and would prefer to take an easier, happier path. It’s a choice that’s impossible to begrudge, but Yuri knows the silence of his own company best, because of it.

To be looked at, like this. To promise something.

He takes his hand.

****  
  
  


 

**the third song: friendship**

 

Friendship comes to the two of them too easily, a one-way trip down the rabbit hole and Otabek doesn’t want to climb back up. 

Yuri’s no nicer just because they’re friends, now. He still gives him the stinkeye when Otabek throws to him his helmet and tells him to get on, still refuses to back down from any challenges and refuses to owe money with a vindictive determination, still looks like he’s waiting for a fight when Otabek catches his gaze at random.

But then there are other times.

When Otabek braids flowers into his hair in the summer, two boys splayed out on the ground with grass tickling their noses, Yuri doesn’t jerk away like he’s stung and instead shuts his eyes, lashes fanning over his cheek.

“They’re getting married,” he whispers like the words don’t want to be caught, but Otabek has sharp ears and a sharper sense for Yuri’s many, capricious moods.

“You don’t want them to?”

“Not that,” Yuri shakes his head slightly so as not to shift the flowers. Otabek sits up quietly, and just watches him glowing in the sunlight.

“I don’t want them to leave me behind.”

“They’re not going to,” Otabek reminds him. “They’ve essentially adopted you as their first child; the only things missing are legal documents. Yakov just about needs a permit to take you to training.”

“I know,” Yuuri mumbles, tilts his face into the ground and muffles his voice. “It’s dumb. They’re dumb. They look so stupid, looking at each other with those lovesick eyes. Who would fall in love with either of them, anyway, except for those two.”

“Alright,” Otabek lies back down in the grass. He doesn’t say anything else; he doesn’t need to.

Friendship, or something more? He doesn’t know which he’s praying for, but if now is not the time, he’s certain he’ll feel ready when it is. To decide, of course. Not that he’s decided already.

Otabek turns his head to the side and -

There’s Yuri looking straight back at him.

Oh, he’s decided already. He decided a long time ago, watching the lithe figure of the little Russian fairy in his first decade, but he’s been too afraid to admit it to himself.

****  
He doesn’t have to, just yet.  


 

**Author's Note:**

> i wasn't particularly happy with how this turned out, but i'm really glad that people enjoyed it! thank you so much for your kind words ❤
> 
> @ yuri p's phenomenal agape performance & the way that he watched otabek's SP


End file.
